Thursday, August 20, 2015

The 2015 high school football season will get underway tonight

Wendell Hart

Many high schools across the state will kick off their 2015
seasons either tonight (Thursday) or tomorrow (Friday) night, and those that
don’t will begin their seasons next week.

Sparta will open their regular season schedule tomorrow
night when they play Hooper Academy in Evergreen. That same night, Hillcrest
will travel to Grove Hill for a preseason game against Clarke County High
School, a week before the Jags open their regular season against Monroe County
High School in Evergreen on Aug. 28.

Everyone here at The Courant is hoping that both of our
local schools have great, injury-free seasons. Ideally, they’ll both post
better records than last season, return to the playoffs and represent the
county well on the playing field. Good luck to both teams as they get their
seasons going.

----- 0 -----

Just to show how much things have changed, I was looking
through my notes earlier today and saw where in 1951, Evergreen High School
didn’t even start preseason practice until Aug. 20. Wendell Hart was
Evergreen’s coach back in those days, and he asked all prospective players to
meet that afternoon at 2 p.m. in Memorial Gym, which most folks nowadays call
the Old Evergreen Junior High School Gym. That season, the Aggies didn’t open
their regular season schedule until Sept. 14, when they were scheduled to play
Millry in Evergreen.

----- 0 -----

From an historical standpoint, Aug. 20, is a big day in the
history of football because it was on that day in 1920 that professional
football was “born” when seven men met to organize a professional football
league at the Jordan and Hupmobile Auto Showroom in Canton, Ohio. The meeting
led to the creation of the American Professional Football Conference (APFC),
the forerunner of the National Football League.

The men at that meeting represented the Akron Pros, the
Canton Bulldogs, the Cleveland Indians and the Dayton Triangles, and this
league went on to hire football legend Jim Thorpe to serve as their first
president. The APFC originally included 14 teams, and only two of those teams,
the Decatur Staleys and the Chicago Cardinals still exist today in altered
forms. Football fans today will know the Staleys as the Chicago Bears and the
Chicago Cardinals as the present day Arizona Cardinals.

----- 0 -----

If you’re still interested in signing up to compete in our
local ESPN College Football Pick ‘Em contest, you still have plenty of time to
do so. To sign up, visit
http://games.espn.go.com/college-football-pickem/2015/en/ and register. Our
local group is called the “South Alabama FB Experts,” and the password to get
into the group is “football.”

As of this writing (Monday), only seven people, including
me, have signed up, so I hope more of you will join the fun before the contest
begins on Sept. 5. For the record, Glennis Curry is the reigning local contest
champion, but he has yet to sign up for this year’s contest. In other words, at
this point, there’s plenty of room for someone who thinks they can take top
honors this year.